Sunday, April 8, 2012

Coming Clean

Update: Time to Come Clean

As many (and I mean, many) of outlets have reported, this is
indeed a MOCK schedule that I completely made up for the NFL 2012 Regular
Season. If that's all you need to hear,
that's fine. If you want to hear more,
feel free to keep reading.

Sidenote:Text I received: "Well, you had a good run... Now Roger Goodell is gonna suspend you from watching the first 4 games of the season"

I'm a huge NFL fan.
Yes, I have a life. Yes, I have a
job. In a roundabout way, I was inspired
to create this 2012 MOCK schedule by ESPN's NFL Playoff Machine (http://espn.go.com/nfl/playoffs/machine). I started creating my own playoffs machine,
which contained all 17 weeks of the regular season from 2011. I wanted to have this basic concept completed so that when the actual
2012 schedule was released, I could quickly plug it in my template and then my
playoffs machine would be available to go live.
However, I got a little over halfway done, and decided to switch gears
and see how difficult it would be to create a (somewhat) realistic schedule of
the 2012 NFL Regular Season and see if it would pick up any steam. This started as a small project, but I had NO
idea how much work had to be put in to fit the criteria for an NFL schedule.
Such as:

1. Cowboys @ Giants Week 1

2. Patriots @ Rams in London Week 8 (with Week 9 byes)

3. At least two other games between a divisional repeat game

4. No more than 3 consecutive home/away games (which my
schedule doesn't even follow)

5. Thanksgiving - Dallas home game against an NFC opponent and Detroit home game against
an AFC opponent

6. No Giants/Jets home games on the same day

7. Every team having one, and only one, Thursday game

8. No Oakland
Raiders home games the same day as an Oakland Athletics home game

11. NFL Broadcasting issues with San
Francisco and Oakland
playing same at the same time on the same network

I posted this MOCK schedule Wednesday
night (April 4th) and sent out a few generic tweets to see if anyone would pick
it up. Well, Friday (April 6th) rolled
around and I saw the story posted on ProFootballTalk (http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2012/04/06/league-says-leaked-regular-season-schedule-is-bogus/). Immediately, I checked my blogspot and saw
that I had over 54,000 page views. As of
posting this update, I'm at over 83,000 page views. While it was amazing to
watch it spread like wildfire, it was even more fun to see the excitement that
comes behind the release of a simple schedule.
I know people pointed out the flaws in my schedule left and right
(Steelers/Bengals opening stretch, Bears schedule have all the away games
frontloaded in the schedule, Eagles having a Thursday game before the bye), but
trying to fix any one of those flaws leads to at least 2 or 3 more issues. I also clearly botched the 4:05pm vs 4:15pm
thing, and just put all FOX games as 4:05pm and all CBS games as 4:15pm. With that being said, I don't envy all of the
work that the NFL schedule makers have to do.
If anything, it makes me respect them a lot more. I can't imagine how many drafts they create
and how many times they think everything lines up, only to find one glaring
mistake. I was extremely critical of
some things in the schedule last year (like Philadelphia
traveling to Seattle
for a Thursday game), but this experience taught me that some things just can't
be avoided. I have so many rough drafts
of my work that documents all of the steps from start to finish in making my
schedule. Whenever the NFL Schedule
comes out, I'll be the first one to analyze it just like many of you will. I don't expect the actual schedule to be
anything like this at all.

But as I mentioned earlier, it was
entertaining to see what this fake schedule created around the internet. NFL Message Boards being flooded with topics and
messages analyzing the schedule. Every
fan base feels like their team deserves more PrimeTime games. Everyone said my MNF Schedule was atrocious
(look at last years, I purposely picked less-than-stellar games). People started immediately going down the
schedule and picking wins and losses.
And last but not least, @incarceratedbob jumped on this story, posted it
all over his twitter and blogspot, gave me absolutely no credit or
recognition, and tried to post my own work as his own. He also went as far as
tweeting, "**UPDATED NFL NEWS** NFL decides 2push back original date of
releasing 2012 schedule(Leaked dates are why they moved back announcement)#IBN" While many websites posted the schedule, they
all said it was complete speculation and should be taken with a grain of salt. ProFootballTalk is, without a doubt, my
favorite website and there's never a moment where I don't have it up when I'm
at my computer. If there was ever any
doubt that Incarcerated Bob was a complete and total fraud, this proves
it. Credible websites like
ProFootballTalk immediately squashed the story.
Same goes for a ton of other websites.

With all of that out in the open,
feel free to contact me via my twitter @EaglesStats or email me
eaglesstats@gmail.com. And like I
mentioned earlier, I'll be the first one to analyze the real NFL schedule, once
it's actually available on Tuesday, April 17th at 7:00pm. Thanks for the page views, and I'll actually
go back to publishing Eagles stats when the 2012 NFL season rolls around.

way 2 remove the 1st comment man, can't take the heat wtf are u doing in the oven? Way to set back bloggers who work hard to build up their sites. We have a hard enough time as it is gaining respect and traffic and then someone like you does this. BTW, I've read through many of your columns and I must say, you suck buddy. Give it up and shut down this POS blog, you don't deserve it. I'm sure you'll remove my comment after it hurts your feelings but know this: the only way you will ever get big time page views is by posting fake crap. Your work sux.

Matt, chill bro. I didn't remove it, he deleted it himself. If I remove a comment, it says "This comment has been removed by a blog administrator."If the user removes his own comment, it says "This comment has been removed by the author."

So I won't remove your comment, unless you remove it first tso that you don't look like a complete and total fool "buddy"

I for one applaud the effort from the fake schedule maker, someone needs to keep the NFL honest, and I bet they got some good feedback from the fake schedule and might even make a tweak here or there based on the feedback received from said fake schedule. In previous years, the schedule has been released by now so its about time NFL, I guess all those Thursday night games take some time to plan out!

Thanks. I didn't expect it to take off like it did at all, so it was a wild ride. And I just took this as a personal challenge to myself, and I'll say I was mostly successful (minus the few glaring mistakes).

I think that people getting upset with Eagles Stats calling the guy a fraud need to understand his context, that being that he Insterstate Bob didn't give him credit. Although, Eagles, you gotta admit that if Bob thought it was a legit schedule, he likely wouldn't give you credit, right?

If you're upset with a person for putting a fake NFL schedule out there, it's just my opinion, but maybe you need to chill out a little. It's just a game.

I wouldn't apologize, either. Get your facts straight before you start running with them. We all could use to learn this lesson.

To be honest, I had no idea who Bob even was before this whole thing. But it just proves that if you jump on every single rumor, you're gonna hit on some of them, but you'll also miss on a ton of them. Perfect example here.